


the hardest parts

by lestraea



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Coda, Episode Related, F/M, Gen, Tenzin - Freeform, Toph Bei Fong - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-10
Updated: 2012-07-10
Packaged: 2017-11-09 13:40:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/456064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lestraea/pseuds/lestraea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first step is always the hardest. Lin thinks that’s wrong. The hardest parts all come before the step. A coda to "Turning the Tides", or what happened after she fell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the hardest parts

Lin lay face-down. Lin lay face-down as rain fell in a steady drip and seeped through the seams of her armour and gripped her limbs with ice-cool fingers. Lin lay face-down, her legs bent awkwardly beneath her slumped body and her arms like dead things beside her, palms-up, facing the blackened sky.

Lin lay face-down and dreamed.

-

There was a finger pressed down against the middle of her head. And orange and yellow, and steel-blue arrows that wound, round and round, in circles going nowhere. A masked face with two dark pits where the eyes should be, and silence that cut through the rain like an extended gasp, and then the comfort of stone and hard-packed earth at her cheek.

(And the quick, alarming realisation that she couldn’t feel it—hear it—sense it—)

And then came nothing.

-

“You did good, kid.”

Lin is standing beside all the other cadets, newly-minted graduates of the Republic City Police Force Academy, all dressed in the cool navy and grey armour, gold buttons gleaming along their sleeves, polished boots clacking against the floor rhythmically, and the scent of starch that stiffens every crease in every pant-leg in the room.

She looks straight ahead into the distance as the Chief of Police pins the silver eagle-hawk to the front of her jacket, arms set in a stiff salute.

When she hears the words, whispered so only she can hear—and only because she’s listening with her feet and not so much with her ears, she smiles. Looks down at the smooth, dark hair framing a head that falls a good five inches below her own, grey wisps in the blunt bangs; and the fingers smoothing the pin against her chest (fingers that are as familiar to her as her own, the neatly-pared nails and the hard calluses that can be gentle), and mumbles just as quietly, “Thank you, Chief Beifong.” _Mom_.

-

The rain stopped. There was a strange stillness now, airless. A piercing caw—a rooster perhaps or some other mindless bird. She could feel the gravel beneath her cheek, sharp stones jutting into the skin, into the claw-shaped scars that mark it. But even with her ear pressed this close to the ground she couldn’t—

-

Tenzin is asleep, his chest rises and falls in a sluggish sort of way, every few seconds he scrunches his nose and grunts and sighs deeply. Lin is sprawled out half on top of him (she was always a messier sleeper when he was in bed with her), her head nestled in the middle of his chest and her eyes slit open in incipient wakefulness. Her fingers glide absently down the line of his arm where the cobalt airbender tattoo is. She’d made fun of the arrows for hours the day after his induction ceremony, and spent nights running her tongue along the length of them, tasting the salty skin beneath.

She grins, and lets her hand drift to his side, trace the lean muscles there and down to the spot above his belly-button, a slow circle. His heart hiccups noticeably beneath her ear but he stays asleep.

She fiddles with the rim of his pants, and dives underneath, rests her fingers on his half-roused penis, and gives it a firm stroke. That part of him doesn’t need a second invitation to wake and his heartbeat picks up, thrumming solidly at her cheek, and without trying she can see his blood rushing down below. His hips thrust upwards a little into her hand and he groans out her name, his eyes blinking awake.

Leaning up on her elbow, she presses a kiss on his throat where his pulse ripples beneath the skin, and nuzzles the wisps of his beard, and says, “Took you long enough, I’ve been awake for hours.”

He’s hard now, and she wraps her fingers around his length, squeezing just so and he grunts, draws her up for an open-mouthed kiss. “I highly doubt that, Captain Beifong.”

Hooking her leg over his hip she sits up and straddles him, palms splayed on his chest. “Are you calling me a liar, Fleet-feet?”

His hands are locked on her waist now, and she can feel the hard length of him pressed up against her cunt. He grins lazily. And she thinks how much she loves Tenzin like this, all sleep-fuzzed, smiling, eyes hot. None of the frowning deliberation of the youngest member of Republic City’s Council of Four or the too-serious look of one of the last of the airbenders.  “Well, I’d never be able to tell. That’s your skill, remember?”

He digs his fingers into the flesh at her hips and she slips his cock out of his pants, grasps the length of it in a tight fist that makes him arch upwards like a strung bow. She rises up on her haunches, rocks hard until he fills her, they both gasp at the feel of it. “Oh—of course it’s my skill, and don’t you forget it.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he says. And then his hands are drawing her down by the neck to run his tongue along her lower lip, mutter her name in a low, desperate moan. And they both forget.

-

It was morning.  She knew this by way the sun hit one side of her face.  She blinked, and winced at the glare of it.  She should move, she thought. She should get up.

 _Get up, kid, there’s no one around to do it for you_.  She imagined a pair of green eyes, glazed over by a pearl-white cataract, tilted sadly at the corners.

The laughter caught her by surprise; gurgled up her throat and out, painfully loud in the empty courtyard. It hurt deep in her chest to make the sound but she couldn’t seem to stop, and it wheezed out in harsh pants in her now-constricting armour. She’d gotten fanciful in her old age, lying around in the dirt and seeing ghosts.  _Yeah, that you get from your father’s side of the family—not mine. Now get up, I haven’t got all day here and neither have you_.

“Yes, Mother,” she said.

-

When she was seven, Mother took her to a cave, somewhere deep in the snow-tipped mountains outside of Omashu. She took her by the hand and led her through a maze of unlit caves and corridors where bats flapped their wings and blinked yellow eyes in the dark. There was the rustle of creatures she didn’t want to name, and every few seconds, a growl or a muted roar came through the walls. She was scared, and she clung tightly to Mother’s hand—Mother who walked slow and steady in the dark with her old sureness, and didn’t stop until she reached some undetermined point where the dankness of the cave chilled her bones and the inky-blackness, the very bowels of the mountain, made it impossible to see more than two feet with her eyes.

When she was seven, Mother took her to a cave, somewhere deep in the snow-tipped mountains outside of Omashu—and left her there to find her own way back out.

-

The first step is always the hardest.

Lin thinks that’s wrong. The hardest parts all come before the step.

-

One last look.

There was Tenzin urging Oogie to move faster, back hunched and tense beneath the voluminous air-bending robes, as if he wished he could fly off the bison and drag them all to safety by himself. There were the three children with their impossibly young faces, soft and yielding, frozen in gradations of horror and fear. In their eyes she saw him, and the ghosts of entire civilisation, as fragile and wispy as air. Then there was Pema, lines of strain bracketing her mouth, a film of sweat on her brow, and the limp tiredness of sodden leaves in her eyes—the baby silent and still in her arms.

And then there was Tenzin.

She knew what to do.  “Whatever happens to me, don’t turn back.”

Before anyone could say anything, before she could hesitate—she was flying.

-

Lin opened her eyes again and it was still dark. She had been dreaming just moments ago or _remembering_ —something in between. The rain was a fine spray now, and she could taste wet sand against her mouth and grit.

It didn’t hurt. She thought that strange, when someone took something so a part of you—she thought that should hurt at least a little, in the moment. It hadn’t. But the loss did, the emptiness of it, the horrible, weighted – _after_. Of losing an arm and not feeling the amputation but knowing that it was irrevocably gone, that you were somehow less without it than you once were. Or just different.

She inhaled, steady now. And flattened her palms on the soil beneath her, and there was nothing but silence and a blank blackness where her eyes should see. She bit the soft skin at her cheek, and tasted blood. She would _not_ cry.

-

She gets up.


End file.
